The RFP from a whale prospect lands in your in-box. What do you do next?

Most salespeople get excited, tell their boss that all their hard work cosying up to this company’s middle management and procurement team has paid off. They’d spend a day or two reading through the tome that reminds them of War and Peace, written by an 8-year old lawyer. Then they’d get the team together to plan who was going to do what. Much resource would be thrown at meeting the unreasonable deadline set by the “prospect” … but not much actual thought.

They wouldn’t ask some fundamentally important questions; questions to which answers are imperative to decide what we do next, because NOT ALL RFPs ARE LEGITIMATE! In fact, most aren’t. Most are an attempt to get free consulting from vendors too scared, excited, lazy or stupid to check if the RFP is even real.

Consider these questions…

How did we make the list for receiving this RFP?

How many RFPs were sent?

What do we know about the prospect’s history surrounding RFPs?

Do they have a preferred supplier list (PSL) and are we on it?

If not, do they always give the business to someone on the PSL?

If we decide to participate, what happens next?

What role, if any, will their incumbent supplier play?

Will the low bid be the one that wins?

What results is the prospect company hoping to achieve by implementing the contents of the RFP?

Why aren’t they doing it in-house?

Is the timescale realistic?

Do we understand what caused them to go to market with this RFP? DO we understand the different drivers and centres of dissatisfaction?

Do we have a sponsor, coach or advocate in the prospect company to whom we can submit a rough draft, have it critiqued to make sure we have identified their priorities and covered all the issues they consider most important?

Are they high enough in the company to be able to provide us with the answers we need or just the ones they are willing to give any vendor?

Should we involved our senior management?

Have we identified to whom the prospect’s decision-making committee already has allegiances by suing our personal networks, trawling through LinkedIn and the internet to see what connections they have to our competitors and the incumbent?

What is the likely cost of sale to participate in this bid, win or lose?

Is this even legitimate?

Can we win it?

Are there any conditions that we do not qualify against that will preclude us from winning this e.g not ISO9000 compliant, no sector experience and sector experience is a must have, we don’t have 3-years accounts, they want to use their T&Cs not ours, our non-negotiable payment terms are unacceptable to them?

Do we want to win it?

What opportunity cost will we incur if we plough time, money and resources into this bid and is there a better way to invest our scarce and valuable resources?

Is this RFP going to be profitable if we win it? By when?

Once you have your questions clear in your mind, are you allowed to speak to someone, not in procurement or a technical buying capacity, at a high enough level to understand the business drivers behind this RFP invitation?

Given that RFP responses are usually the second highest hidden cost in any selling organisation after wrong hires the killer question you need to answer for yourselves is:

What are our chances of winning it?

Should we participate in this RFP process?

Take the emotion out of RFPs and never lift a finger until you have done your research and picked up the phone.

A simple rule of thumb for management to eliminate wasted effort and falling into the free consulting trap is that selling the opportunity internally should be twice as hard as selling it to the prospect.

Having sat through hours of counter-intuitive training, practised tools, techniques and processes time and again, one might expect someone newly-trained in Sandler to fly out of the blocks, closing everything in sight.

Sometimes that happens. One client of mine was moving from account management to sales, worked with me for just a few weeks and was almost instantly lauded as their top salesperson. She is, however, more of the exception than the rule.

So, what typically, is the effect of all that investment?

Time and again it is the same message. Those that grasp the point of “Pain then Budget and Decision” learn to disqualify prospects that could never hope to be a real client. That means the effect is not an increase in the value of their pipeline, rather a significant decrease.

The relief I hear from so many businesses that they can stop chasing after prospects! We only want to be spending our time with clients, customers who want to and will pay us for what we offer. Why do we want to spend an extra minute with a prospect who does not want to or will not pay us for our product or service?

Our role is to help both sides figure out, as quickly as possible, if they are not going to be right for us or not. That’s it. It’s obvious when put like that. But all our salesmanship is going in another direction; persuading through features and benefits. We think we should be building “pipeline”. In fact, we should only be talking to those who are going to buy.

So the immediate effects of training with Sandler is increased freedom; feedom to choose our customers, freedom to spend more time with people who value what we have to offer, freedom from endless technical proposals. Does all that “freedom” end up in more clients and more profit? Most definitely.

If you want more freedom from the tyranny of trying to close sales, maybe it would make sense to look at Sandler in a bit more detail!

Paul’s experience spans over twenty years of selling, sales management and training. He has worked in the financial services sector including accountancy and has been responsible for the commercial success of sales departments at director level in advertising. His clients report up to 300% increase in turnover by working with him. He is dedicated to helping businesses grow through assessments, training, coaching and mentoring.
Tel: 01784 390623
Mobile: 07866 518848